When not disrupting an industry, growing his company or pitching prospective clients, Shubham Banerjee can be found meeting his board, brainstorming with engineers or knocking on the doors of venture capitalists. Such is the life of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

He is 13 years old.

“Yes, I started young,” he said this week, as his father drove him from school, still in his navy blue uniform, to meet a potential investor. “But you see, I’ve been playing with Lego since I was two years old.”

Instacart’s $210 million Series C round capped off an impressive 2014 for Y Combinator backed companies. How impressive? With huge valuation step-ups by alums including Zenefits, Docker and Mixpanel, and exits by the likes of Twitch Interactive to Amazon, Y Combinator’s top 10 grads have accrued $32 billion in aggregate value to date, according to CB Insights data. This includes both financing valuations for still private companies and exits where the company’s valuation, real or rumored, was disclosed.

While huge valuations and funding rounds dominated the headlines in 2014, it turned out to be another huge year for seed-stage venture investing. According to CB Insights data, the number of active seed venture capital investors jumped to a new high – up 23% from 2013′s total. The rise of micro VC funds has helped contribute to this trend, but it’s not just the small guys getting busy. Khosla Ventures, which ties for 9th based on seed activity this year, is looking to raise a whopping $400M seed fund according to filings.

Topping the minds of the region's technology leaders this year is the talk of cyber security and the need for businesses to arm themselves against an ever-growing arsenal of threats.

Hardly a day goes by that a story about cyber security and its effects on national and economic security is not brought to light, said Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council and a speaker at the 2015 Northern Trust Economic Trends Breakfast presented by BizTimes Media.

This Summit will provide participants with a comprehensive look at the Innovation Body of Knowledge for product strategy, marketing, R&D, development, and commercialization functions.  There will be an emphasis on top management enablers and techniques that create and embed systematic corporate innovation.  Primary and secondary industry research on innovation tools, techniques, and metrics are employed throughout the Summit.

Can Davos 2015 solve the world’s problems?

That is a question posed by one of the sessions at last week’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in the prestigious ski resort of Davos-Klosters. For those unfamiliar, the WEF meeting is an invitation-only gathering of the global leaders of business, government and NGOs, whilst the WEF itself is a Swiss nonprofit foundation with the motto “Entrepreneurship in the global public interest”.

Image: Klaus Schwab (L), Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum and Ueli Maurer (R), President of the Swiss Confederation and Federal Councillor of Defence, Civil Protection and Sports of the Swiss Confederation are captured during Welcoming Remarks at the Annual Meeting 2013 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 23, 2013.. Image Credit: World Economic Forum via photopin cc

More than a century ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner asserted that the colonial frontier turned European emigrants into American democrats. Having crossed the Atlantic, colonists plunged into a wild world of dense forests and savage people. In braving the dangers and seizing new opportunities, the newcomers gradually shed their European heritage, which valued cohesion, tradition and hierarchy. These newly made Americans would come to cherish individualism, innovation, equal legal rights, and the unequal economic results of geographic and social mobility. With his “Frontier Thesis,” Turner codified a...

Melbourne, the southernmost state capital of the Australian mainland, was established by Europeans a couple hundred years ago at the juncture of a great river and a wind-whipped bay. Port Phillip Bay sprawls over 750 square miles, providing feeding grounds for whales and sheltering coastlines for brine-scented beach towns. But it’s an exceptionally shallow waterway, less than 30 feet in most places. It’s so shallow that 10,000 years ago, when ice sheets and glaciers held far more of the planet’s water than is the case today, most of the bay floor was high and dry and grazed upon by kangaroos.

Image: Tim J Keegan/Flickr

A recent story in The Wall Street Journal by Ruth Simon and Caelainn Barr had a provocative headline, calling young American entrepreneurs an “endangered species.”

The idea of youthful entrepreneurs diminishing in numbers conflicts with the portrayal of entrepreneurship in popular culture and the media as booming in college dorm rooms, with young adults dressed in hoodies, not suit and tie. But the data give reason for the Journal’s declaration and should cause policymakers to pause and reflect on the implications.

The Northland Center for Advanced Professional Studies and its higher education and business partners received a key designation Tuesday. Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon announced that the Northland CAPS partnership has been designated as an Innovation Campus. Nixon launched the Innovation Campus initiative in 2012 to create partnerships among high schools, higher education institutions and area businesses

If you want to drive innovation in your organization, then Paul Sloane has some suggestions to help you succeed. 1. Have a vision for change

You cannot expect your team to be innovative if they do not know the direction in which they are headed. Innovation has to have a purpose. It is up to the leader to set the course and give a bearing for the future. You need one overarching statement which defines the direction for the business and which people will readily understand and remember. Great leaders spend time illustrating the vision, the goals and the challenges. They explain to people how their role is crucial in fulfilling the vision and meeting the challenges. They inspire men and women to become passionate entrepreneurs finding innovative routes to success.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

The crowdfunding industry has been making great strides in helping entrepreneurs from all industry sectors solve the ever-present problem of undercapitalization. And forward-thinking venture capitalists have begun to take notice.

Given the fact that more startups and small businesses are launching crowdfunding campaigns, it’s no wonder that many venture capital firms are turning to crowdfunding platforms to access new deal flow. New proposals are the life blood of  venture capitalists or funding firms.  

Most entrepreneurs I meet are reluctant to disclose anything about their idea to investors before getting a signed confidential disclosure agreement (CDA). Professional investors and advisors, on the other hand, usually refuse to sign these agreements today due to the risk of litigation and administrative workload, and will walk away. How can you make this a win-win opportunity?

A 17 year-old just dropped out of high school to launch Leangap, a 6-week summer entrepreneurship accelerator for teen startups. The program will debut in Boston in summer of 2015 and will welcome a pilot class of 40 students. The program is highly selective, and is looking for talented youth who show passion, leadership, and uniqueness in their application.

Image: http://www.prurgent.com/ 

BEIJING, Jan. 24, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator in Beijing held a Demo Day for its fifth cohort, which included 15 startups presenting their companies to a group of over 200 venture capitalists, media and industry professionals, At the event, Microsoft Ventures also announced the succeeding cohort.

Vanessa Gao, CEO in Residence of Microsoft Ventures Accelerator in Beijing said, "This is the best era for business creation. Government support, as well as encouragement from society, provides entrepreneurs with the resources and respect they need to pave the way towards realizing their dreams. Over the past 30 months, we have had the honor of working alongside the most outstanding entrepreneurial teams and helping to facilitate their rapid development."

Image: http://money.cnn.com/ 

The East Village office space that will house Des Moines' Global Insurance Accelerator will a mix of coworking and private environments.

Brian Hemesath, the accelerator's managing director, provided a tour of the accelerator's future home Tuesday and discussed some of his plans for the space.

Image: http://www.desmoinesregister.com/  - File Photo

One of the biggest debates in the angel industry is how much due diligence investors should do before they invest. From “rank and file” angels to rock star investors like Ron Conway or Mark Cuban, opinions differ vastly from literally doing none to conducting formal processes that take months.  So how do you decide what the right amount is for you?  And what are the factors you really need to check out?

In 2011, two business college professors put numbers to an concept that quite a few assumed accurate: that a vibrant research university can drive an economy. They studied organizations began by alumni of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and identified that those corporations had offered 1.7 million jobs and generated $1 trillion in revenue annually.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

The blue team may have lost the political battle last year, but with the rapid fall of oil and commodity prices, they have temporarily gained the upper hand economically. Simultaneously, conditions have become more problematical for those interior states, notably Texas and North Dakota, that have benefited from the fossil fuel energy boom. And if the Obama administration gets its way, they are about to get tougher.

As an entrepreneur, you’re used to making sacrifices for your success. But all too often, those sacrifices include your health. You tell yourself you don’t have time to exercise or eat right because you’re always on the go. You have a business to run. Getting to the gym or the grocery store is the last thing on your mind, and a healthy lunch (or lunch in general) is often the first thing to go.

But high-performance people need high-performance bodies, and you can’t achieve peak performance if you don’t take the time to fuel yourself properly. In one study of workplace health, employees with unhealthy diets were 66 percent more likely to report a loss in productivity.